Legacy applications provide access to data using structured and defined interfaces designed by application developers using a pre-programmed sequence of application specific screens and reports. As a result, the application data can be efficiently searched only in ways that were anticipated by the application developers, which is usually based only on specific key fields.
In many cases there is a need to access data in ways which were not anticipated by the application developer. As a result, finding the data is a slow and time consuming process for the user due to the lack of necessary search interfaces. In addition, accessing the data can require heavy processing from the underlying mainframe database since it may require sequential database queries.
While multiple products and extensive technology exists in the area of searching and indexing mainframe databases, the traditional technology is focused on providing pointers to a specific database record or field based on a free text search term. Yet, these products do not provide the context of how the data was introduced to the mainframe.
Moreover, the traditional technology is merely focused on searching text, XML and HTML data stored inside the mainframe database.
One or more embodiments discussed herein can address the aforementioned problems, by providing quick data retrieval capabilities based on unstructured search queries. The free text search engine system can have an ability, based on a search term, to provide pointers into the actual application screens used for creating, reading, updating and deleting a certain value or keyword. The free text search engine system also can provide search capabilities of information such as customer, order or item identifiers and numeric information such as transaction amounts. For each search term the results data can present the transactions of the data and not just its current state.